Moving From Stack to Queue?

One of the things I have a problem with in projects (school, work, or personal) is when they morph into a stack data structure. For instance, if you’re thinking about something you need to do, but to do that, you first have to do another thing, and to do that other thing, you first have to do some other thing - that’s what I mean. Once the third or fourth things gets piled on top I tend to say “to heck with it” and go do something else. (Yeah, that’s not a very productive strategy, I admit.) It feels hopeless getting to the bottom.

Fortunately, one thing we do in our meetings with Dr. Paul is turn the impossible stack back into a queue - a list where it’s obvious what needs to be done next. (It’s really more of a perspective shift than anything.)

(Of course, our project is really like a tree or maybe a digraph - we could go in all kinds of directions at once. But that’s equally tricky to navigate.)

So, our next stage right now is to design the database to store our patient data. We talked with Dr. Paul about object-oriented databases but I think that might be more than we want to get into at this moment (projects within projects).

Oops, did I say database? I should have said “data model.” But as with so many things, I’ve mainly designed data models by designing databases (kind of like I’ve usually designed objects in Java by coding them first, though I can sometimes manage it the other way around).

Anyway, Olga and I are going to work on our ideas about that and then meet to hammer something out.

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